“Sobriety in an Intoxicating World”
Romans 12:1-8
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
8/27/17
When reading
through Paul’s letter to the Romans, one notices that the Apostle is both passionate
and compassionate. He is candid with his criticism and vulnerable with his own
failures and foibles. He manages to be direct and challenging on the one hand,
and gracious and gentle on the other. Paul demonstrates a kind of holy balance,
the balance it requires to be truly pastoral and loving, the kind of balance it
requires to be Christlike in and for the world.
The word balance may be a little misleading. The dynamic to which Paul invites
us is not like tip-toeing along a tightrope. It’s more of a one-foot-in/one-foot-out
kind of thing. “Do not be conformed to this world,” he says, “but be
transformed by the renewing of your minds.” This is one of the principal
passages from which we extrapolate the adage “be in the world but not of the
world.”
In his high priestly prayer, Jesus says
it this way: My disciples “do not
belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world…As [God] has sent me
into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” (John 17:16&18)
This “balance,” then, has less in
common with a wire-walking Wallenda than it does with an agent on some
undercover assignment. So, it’s really more of a paradox that helps us to live
deliberately in the world, to recognize and enter all its slippery scheming,
all its self-serving duplicity, and the outright epidemic of its greed and fear
without forgetting who we are, without forgetting that God’s holiness constitutes the core of our human being. Through Paul, the Spirit is
encouraging us to be defined and guided by a gratefully chosen vision of
ourselves, our neighbors, and of the entire creation as a kind of petri dish of
holiness. The Creation is God’s preferred medium of self-expression.
Now, yes, the world is broken. It’s
constantly plagued by selfishness, fear, prejudice, and plain old meanness.
Then again, the whole story of Israel, and the very life of Jesus, declare that
we experience God most intimately and immediately in the midst of the suffering.
Because God is all about redemption and renewal, because God is all about “transformed”
and “renewed” minds, God chooses to work through and to be known in all that is
“weak” and “despised” in the world. (1Cor. 1:27-28)
Take note: Disciples who feel strong and privileged, and who live in strong and privileged circumstances often
dismiss the in but not of the world approach.
They choose, instead, to associate their strength and privilege with divine
favor. But isn’t that to give up? Isn’t that to choose to be of as well as in the world? Having made that kind of choice, world-serving
disciples tend to gloss over things like, “Blessed are the poor…the hungry…the
meek…the merciful…[and] the persecuted.” (Matthew 5); things like, “Religion that is
pure and undefiled before God…is…to care for orphans and widows in their
distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” (James 1:27); and things like,
“what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love kindness, and walk
humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)
Paul clearly find the Romans
lacking in the crucial trait of humility. “For by the grace given to me,” says
the Apostle, “I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly
than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment.”
Sober
judgment.
Joe Sachs taught philosophy at St.
John’s College in Annapolis for thirty years. He translated numerous ancient
Greek texts. And where the NRSV translators chose “sober,” Sachs would have
chosen “temperance.” Either way, the Greek word is sophrosune, and according to Sachs, it refers to “the active
condition by which one chooses bodily pleasures in the ways and to the extent
that they enhance life, not by an effort of self-control but by a harmony of
desire with reason.”1 A willfully-chosen harmony of desire with reason. Talk about a complicated balance!
Sachs says that the ancient Greco-Roman
culture recognized human desires as crucial aspects of human nature. As such,
they warrant satisfaction. The caveat is that authentic satisfaction and
expression of human desires requires sophrosune.
And according to Sachs, this sobriety/temperance is “the stable state of
character which, in any mature human being, replaces the overgrown impulses of
childhood.”2
Paul’s “sober judgment” has to do
with overcoming childishness and living a mature faith. Remember what he says
to the Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a
child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to
childish ways.” (1Cor. 13:11)
Mature disciples of Jesus Christ
inhabit God’s creation with transformed and renewed minds – with sober minds. Childish and untransformed
minds, are vulnerable to the intoxicating ways and means of the world. Greed,
fear, and self-absorption can overwhelm a mind that has not learned to harness
its passions and to offer them up for the well-being of others. A mind
intoxicated by worldly concerns will fixate on its own desires for possessions,
power, attention, and affirmation.
In his book Mere Christianity,
C.S. Lewis expresses all this from a Christian perspective. “If
we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the
most probable explanation,” says Lewis, “is that we were made for another world…Probably
earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy [that desire], but only to arouse
it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, [we] must take care, on the one
hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly [desires], and on
the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only
a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. [We] must keep alive in [ourselves] the
desire for [our] true country, which [we] shall not find till after death...”3
How many times has the story been
told of the person who reaches the top of the ladder and finds himself or
herself unfulfilled? How many times have each of us wanted wanting this thing or
that thing, expecting it to complete us in some way, only to have that thing
expose nothing more than a deeper emptiness in our guts? When we strive only to
get, only to control and conquer, we may achieve what economists call
“satisfaction,” but we inevitably end up wanting more. We end up out of
balance. When we choose to work for something so that it will benefit more than
some visceral, naked, childish want in
ourselves, we have a much better chance of experiencing what Paul calls sophrosune, and what our spiritual
tradition calls joy, gratitude, and new life.
Inhabiting this Creation as
Christian humans means accepting a magnificent and always-frustrating paradox.
We experience that paradox in the fact that while we always have one foot in
this world, as followers of Jesus, we also have one foot in the kingdom of God –
which is our true hope, our true identity, and our eternal home.
1Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle. Translation by Joe Sachs. Focus Publishing, R. Pullins
Co., 2002. P. 211.
2Ibid. p. 211.
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